Bye, Bye Baby Boomers

This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past. Our time to bring new energy and new ideas to the challenges we face. Our time to offer a new direction for this country that we love. – Senator Barack Obama, on the occasion of becoming the Democratic Party’s presumptive nominee for President of the United States — St. Paul, Minnesota June 3, 2008

I am not a woman or a black man. I am not liberal or conservative, and I do not vote or call myself Democrat or Republican. I am not, despite years of penning this god-awful dreck, particularly enamored with politics — at least not in any meaningful way. Fittingly, for the purposes of this piece, I am definitely not a Baby Boomer. I was born in late 1962, and I don’t care what sociologists say, if you were not feasibly able to spark a joint at Woodstock in the summer of ’69, then you are not a Boomer. I was pushing seven, less than ten miles from Yasguar’s Farm in the Catskill Mountains barely staving off stomach rot with the other unfortunates who were vacationing in an emerging disaster area. Our water supply had been fowled by overflowing wells contaminated by the collective defecation of a chemical-addled horde. Nope, I am no Boomer, and neither is Barack Obama. No sense asking him what he was doing during Nam, most likely flipping baseball cards or maybe puking up tainted water like me.

In fact, all the weird shit that passes for campaign bating these days doesn’t work with Obama. He has no particular beef or on any vengeance trip, no tedious defense of failed revolutions or standing firm against The Man. Nobody knows who this guy is really. But we do know he doesn’t have the Us Against Them baggage of the last two presidents; Boomer’s both.

June 3, 2008, at around 9:01 in the pm, eastern time; a seminal moment in American history: Sure, an African American achieves the title of presumptive nominee for a major political party, but what is most telling is he happens to be from my generation — the forgotten generation. Somewhere jammed between the Hippies and the Gen Xer’s, the proud, the cynical, the overfed and over-stimulated; we now have ourselves a candidate. He ain’t old world and he ain’t counterculture; he is new, as in brand-spanking, jack.

The man is right; it is our time.

Shit, Obama may turn out to be a brilliant leader or another scrap paper fraud, squeak out the most unlikely of victories or be crushed like all the other lefty northerners before him, but he’s our swinging dick, and we dig him plenty for it.

And it’s about goddamn time. You know how long I’ve endured this parade of mediocre rich white guy /country bumpkins and their miserable children? Do you realize how many misogynistic, paranoid B-Movie actor jack-offs have captained this ship?

The Boomers had their shot too, and let’s face it, the uprising of the sixties counterculture plummeting into a wretched yuppie gorge, then festering into the sappily nostalgic, and finally careening into a damaged political power play has gone denouement. The tally is in: It was an abject failure; ceremoniously imploded into crystal nothingness by the violence at Altamont, the frenzied con of the Manson Family, through Kent State, into the Age of Nixon, and all the way to the graveyards of Wall Street. Thanks for the music and the drugs; now please burn out and fade away.

Two failed Baby Boomer presidents: The final influence of the gory sixties afterbirth pilfering an already bastardized system with a stale angst better left to the rigors of ancient history.

Hillary Clinton’s doomed campaign of whining low blow militants is a requiem for the Boomers. There she was the night Obama turned a very heavy page talking about “deciding what to do next”, as if anyone is interested in what the loser’s next move might be. Perhaps she’ll have her eggs sunny-side up or learn to marathon or finally divorce the troglodyte she’s been carrying for decades.

It was a long, strange trip from the Inevitable Candidate, “This will be over by February fifth” to twisted RFK assassination references in order to hang around long enough for another mutant to emerge from Archie Bunker’s psyche to destroy the New Wave. Yeah, the only problem with that equation is that Hillary is Archie Bunker now; an anachronistic voice wistfully harkening the “good old days” in a vein attempt to escape irrelevance.

By week’s end the Clintons will have officially had the last shovel of dirt dumped on their botched attempt at being the alternative to the Reagan Myth, which helped usher in the laughably pathetic George W. Bush and his “compassionate conservative” hoax that effectively exposed the whole ruse as the century’s last cruel joke.

Ultimately, America has Big Bill to thank for Captain Shoo-In, another dullard from the Age of Aquarius. Clinton’s legacy, aside from his spastic libido, will be the choke-campaign of his vice president and his spouse blowing a 20-point national poll lead with an over $50 million coffer to a guy no one outside of the south side of Chi-town had heard of 14 months ago.

Baby Bush’s claim to fame beside war, jingoistic fear-mongering and constitutional mockery, will be that he completely snuffed out the wounded remnants of the Reagan Revolution, which had barely survived on the fumes of the first two pathetically ineffectual years of The Big Bill Follies (followed soon after by the scandalized lame-duck years); proving once and for all that a granola-head conman who plays a mediocre sax and a faux cowboy drunkard with a gizzard full of silver spoon is no way to lead a country.

Two failed Baby Boomer presidents: The final influence of the gory sixties afterbirth pilfering an already bastardized system with a stale angst better left to the rigors of ancient history.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

We’ll forgive Bush and the Clintons for their gaudy machinations and ill-conceived governing, coming as it has from a generation of spoiled, self-important, media whoring brats masquerading as revolutionaries; the last rancid fumes of the post-war fist-pumping, tie-dyed rip-off conjured from Madison Avenue to Pennsylvania Avenue, which lorded over the brutal raping of genuine social, cultural, political and philosophical freedom rides from Berkeley to Selma to Greenwich Village.

In the end, the Boomers gave us presidents from both sides of the ideological fence, and they both came up snake eyes. The main issues facing the Clinton and Bush administrations were national health care and social security reform respectively and neither was brought to a vote. We might have even noticed, if not for a plethora of sex jokes and the pulpit grunts, piss fights and money-pit wars, and one disastrous day in the late summer of 2001.

Well, for the Democrats at least, the new generation has spoken: No more Us vs. Them or Burn Baby Burn or police bating, campus-riot, self-flagellating guilt-revolution chic. This is how real revolutions go: Hope. Change. Passion.

The Clintons hung on as long as they could, lying, cheating, changing the rules, and blaming the media. But they are dust, unless Obama has a brain hemorrhage and puts them on the ticket.